Vehicles, such as automobiles, military vehicles, airplanes, etc., may be autonomously controlled to accelerate, brake, and steer the vehicle. As one example, an automobile may be configured to be autonomous so that the acceleration and braking of the automobile may be remotely controlled during durability testing of the vehicle. Traditionally, the automobile is driven by a human test driver during durability testing. Durability testing may include a variety of tests that may be tedious and/or physically demanding on a human test driver. For example, durability testing may include tests that require driving the automobile over bumps, curbs, etc., which may be physically demanding on a human test driver.
To relieve the physical demand on the human test driver, the automobile may be autonomously operated during some tests of the durability testing. During such autonomous operation, the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal of the vehicle may be autonomously operated. For example, an autonomous control device may be connected to the accelerator pedal and the brake pedal for autonomous operation. However, several disadvantages are associated with such known autonomous control devices.
The installation of conventional autonomous control devices may be too time consuming to satisfy time constraints associated with durability testing. In addition, in some instances, e.g., between tests, during selected tests, etc., it is desired to manually operate the automobile by a human driver seated in the vehicle by operating the accelerator pedal and brake pedal with the feet of the human driver. However, removal of the known autonomous control device may be time consuming and unduly delay the durability testing. Further, the installation of the known autonomous control device may require modifications to the automobile that may invalidate the durability test results. The known autonomous control device may also lack satisfactory performance characteristics as a result of lack of responsiveness of components (known as “dead band”), device failure, etc.
As such, there remains an opportunity to design a mechanism that is quickly and easily installed/uninstalled from the vehicle and has satisfactory performance characteristics to autonomously operate the accelerator pedal and brake pedal of the vehicle.